Chapter One

I walk into the restaurant that is about to be bombed. It is a Polish diner, well known for its cabbage rolls. Choosing a seat with a solid wall behind me, I sit down just as the bomb detonates. The walls burst, the roof drops, my pants explode. People become bloody foam. Staring into my cup, I ignore their shrieks as my booth is heavily spackled with crimson clods. But my coffee is brown...and I am brown...

Eating my food slowly, I derive little from it but texture. It’s bland, and it bores me, dulling my senses. I cram slice after slice of heavy bread into my mouth, chewing it with the occasional aid of my coffee, forgetting where I put the bomb or why I even brought it here.

The Poles babble insanely, and I scowl, realizing I have totally forgotten their language. I cannot tell them how very sorry I am for my appalling behavior in Warsaw, during the ghetto assaults. Every Wednesday I come here and eat heavy bread for hours, waiting. But the bomb has not gone off.

I’ve been many men, and once a woman. I have been the sodden earth beneath the wheels of legion. I have fought wars, fucked whores, known love and hate until they were indistinguishable. I have never really died, though I have been the maggot that ate my corpse. Learning much, I had forgotten most of it. I made myself forget many of the more horrific details, but I know that I am not only a child and woman killer, but a devourer of all forms of life, making me into, I believed, the most prolific active serial-mass murderer in the world.

Let this book be a record of my crimes.

I am Whargoul.

I have spent my life as a soldier, doing things I would rather forget. But still it comes back--random blotches of foulness and light, and I find myself sobbing uncontrollably as the waitress returns with my check, puzzled at the tears which slash my cheek. It takes a great effort to retain control as a gang rape is thrust into my brain, triggered by the sweaty face above the fry vat. Shaking with tremor, I pay and turn to leave, hearing the pathetic cries of the woman and the tearing of her clothing, mauled by half the company as her village was burned.

I bumble out, bell clanging madly as half-chewed bread spills out of my contorted face. Outside the street is crowded with machines and humans, all emitting stench. New York is stinking hot, and the garbage men have gone on strike. Great piles of rotting trash slowly join puddles, turning the vast and once proud city into a colossal landfill. The people look bloated and annoyed as they litter, spit, and bitch loudly.

My presence here, amongst my victims, is a psychic intrusion. If only they were more empathic they would sense my thoughts, turn as one and stomp the life out of me. But they are ignorant, perhaps even de-evolving, believing themselves the masters of their Earth when in fact they barely qualified as prey.

I realize that I am on my tiptoes, arms out rigid, fingers clawed, looking like a stricken scarecrow. Wearing a look of utter hopelessness and growing terror, I bulge at the garbage-carpet and release a spit-flecked grunt. I bolt, bobbing and shrieking, running for my life from a blast that never comes.

I am hunted in the ruins of a great city. A creature much like myself is trying to destroy me. I am trying to destroy a creature much like myself. In doing so I have to do all manner of outrageous things. Things I never would have done but for the fact that I was hungry. And hunger gnaws at my mind, makes me writhe...hunger is a slow, lingering death for many. For me it was an abyss. It would drive me mad before it would kill me. But it couldn’t kill me. I’d tried that.

So I was just mad.

Stalingrad. Years ago. We are at the Square of the Fallen; Batz, Eurich, and myself.

We twitch with hunger and anticipation as dusk creeps over the ruined city. Tonight they (not we) are betting everything (and they had nothing left but their lives) on a last-ditch attempt at getting food. It has been days without a scrap. Batz is shitting out his water. He has dysentery and it is getting worse. His guts are liquefying, and coming out his ass. The dugout reeks of his waste but we dare not move. By lying quiet we become a heap of rubble in a city of rubble, and do our best to ignore random shells. And tonight, when the planes of the Luftwaffe reach the halfway point of their perilous journey--when they drop their precious cargo with the Square before us as their aiming point, we shall be there, scanning the sky through the beacon of flares, searching for the canisters bringing bread, meat, and the promise of life.

They also bring out the Russians, and the Russians bring death. That was my food.

We wait in our lair, listening to Batz’s ass mumble. Listening to the city die. The fighting has been going on here for months, and its grim end result is utter devastation. The square before us is ravaged, littered with broken stone and blackened stumps which once bordered the fair vistas of a city park. All that remained was a vast, desolate space, a killing ground. In the center of the lump-dotted landscape was a statue of a group of dancing children, black with soot and some headless but still standing--laughing at us it seemed. Few buildings bordered the square as most were knocked flat, and the ones that stood could provide little but cover. They were grinning maws, their scars as the broken teeth in a smashed skull, and they beckoned only death, in the snouts of weapons trained and the actions of men with murder on their minds.

We had been cut-off for three days, and had to assume that we were surrounded. Though I wore no visible rank, my comrades accepted my leadership without question. All attempts to reach our own lines had failed, so tonight hunger has compelled us to change our tactics.

"Look!" Eurich blurts, stupidly. I hiss at him as I see the dog, 30 meters away, sniffing at a pile of debris. The creature moves quickly, purposefully. He is too well fed to be a stray and undoubtedly his master is watching his movements with care.

The creature is searching. Searching for us. We are transfixed, breathless. Batz raises his rifle but I clamp an iron claw down on the barrel. A shell explodes nearby but we barely notice. The dog is coming closer, homing on the column of stink rising from Batz’s ass. Its tongue lolls as he begins to trot towards our position.

"I could eat you," mutters Eurich.

It stops at ten meters and looks directly into my eyes.

Miles away the shell leaves the tube, soaring with blind purpose. The city on the river curls beneath it, until it leaps to greet the falling projectile.

The blast howls over us, and we bite the earth. For a moment we are gone. A loud buzzing brings me back. It is my brain. I squint through the heat that parts to reveal a smoking crater where the dog had just stood. Batz glares at me with his filthy, miserable face, spattered with bits of dead dog.

"Well there goes all our luck. I was counting on dog stew," he gasps.

"Lick your face," I say, grinning like a dirty skull.

It is a fine tradition that makes me a monstrosity. It is a noble cause that drives me to slay. My mission was a sacred edict to commit mass murder. It will put things to right. It will establish order. These are the lies they tell. To be soldiers we must believe this, in order to rape and kill as one without fear of punishment. And we must never believe we are the blind led by the evil.

My masters must feed. They must feed on human corpses. Remember this when you are asked to worship their next warlord. See his shining face on TV, now promoting a book of his crimes. Think of his mouth packed to bursting with the flesh of the children that he must consume to continue his existence.

I live in a bad part of town, no matter what color you are. I have lairs all over the city but home for me is Harlem, New York, 2001. The city has been dying for years add my neighborhood is on the cutting edge. The buildings around my domicile are mostly deserted and many are in ruin. In a three-block radius, jammed against the railroad tracks, there are only around 15 legally inhabited buildings. Two highways and the railway, effectively isolating the "hood", hem in the area. A liquor store and a market where you can trade food stamps for guns dominate the passage out. The locals are generally desperate and chemically charged. They are also well armed and observant of weakness. Police patrolled the edges of the area. All of these things made it dangerous to travel in daylight.

My building is a two-level garage of very durable construction, with crumbling wooden structures to either side. In front is a block-wide vacant lot littered with debris, behind is a mass of tangled foliage that drops steeply to the tracks. Anyone surveying the area would see a mass of shabby, untenable structures, but upon closer inspection would discover my building was sound, though all the doors and windows were boarded. Prying these loose (it had happened) would reveal bricks beneath. It would take nothing short of a battering ram to enter my property, and even if you succeeded, I would be waiting for you, and if I wasn’t, my pet would be. You had to know the hidden way, a tunnel connected to the bottom of the lift shaft. It came up in the weeds out back, at the end of one of my burrows. This area was littered with trash and bones, which had been split and gnawed, sucked for the marrow. The burrows through the brush were a maze, and I delighted in hunting bums through them. And so far no one had discovered the ancient manhole cover, which was the first gate on the way to my lair.

1942. Now it is fully dark, a moonless night that fades the ruined buildings to dull smudges. A plane flies over, spewing flares that slowly float to earth. The light washes the faces of the dead, creating accusatory shadows, which jab towards me. The sky is fused with the dust of today’s bombardment, and even with my eyes, it is hard to see much. But I can hear the stomachs growling around me.

Tonight should be fun. I will continue my research and hopefully fill my "belly" at the same time.

Somewhere up there is a plane filled with supplies. Perhaps the pilot can even now see the smoldering city on the horizon, like a rift to hell had opened through the crust of the Earth. I gaze into oblivion and imagine I’m looking into his eyes, trying to draw him to us.

We hear the drone of the engines. We look as one to the sky. Behind us searchlights snap on, stabbing the night. The stage is set--the judges of hell await amusement.

The noise grows--there are perhaps several aircraft closing on this spot. The Russian lights now join the spectacle, searching for the interloper, and the flak begins to rise. Burning darts cleave their way aloft, and as the pilot draws near he worries for the fire is intense. He can see the shimmering tract of the great river, and the city clutching it like a diseased lesion. He scans, face bathed in the glow of the instrument panel...there! The call of a thousand dying men brings his machine to the Square of the Damned.

Orders are barked; bundles are prepared. The moment is at hand. A cargo door is opened, revealing the frigid void. From below we gape up at blackness, torn by light, ripped asunder by the now-deafening flak--can he make it?

No, we see the pulsing daggers find his machine, even as the packages begin to tumble. The shredding lead makes short work of the JU-52’s wing, reaching the fuel tanks, erupting them in a crimson blossom that heralds its destruction. It screams, then crumples, and begins to die.

Yet the canisters live. The chutes billow and fall crazily, they scatter, and careening through the evil light and in that breathless moment we know--we shall go! We shall go!

The noise is appalling as the plane sears a scarlet crescent against the sky. People stop killing each other for a moment to behold the falling angel. Within, the pilot flaps vainly against the tide that engulfs him. From where we lie in filth, Batz even now softly moaning, we plot the fall of the closest parachute. It will land close-by, and our lips draw back in lunatic delight.

Machine-gun fire rocks away--artillery pounds the square--smoke envelopes our position and within this smoke we rise. Eurich turns to me, so young, so wasted, eyes gleaming with starvation.

"Come on! Let’s go die!"

He laughs and leaps away, into the acrid fog. We follow and immediately lose each other in the choking shit, which moans about us, corpses whispering as they burn. I move forward, practically blind, one clawed hand clutching my weapon, the other groping the air. Stumbling over rubble, I sense the smoke dissolving and rush forward, low and fast. There are heavy sounds behind me, terrible sounds. The ground heaves with the constant detonations and then the smoke is gone, the arena beckons and I see the canister, parachute riddled with holes, crash into the center of the square moments before its deliverer, the flaming plane, meets earth, in the form of a squat stone building containing men of the NKVD (elite Russian troops), who in less than three seconds are erased in a ruinous hail of shattered block, searing metal and flaming gasoline.

I feel the wash of their deaths, much as you may breathe in moisture on a humid day.

I run for my life towards certain death. Batz and Eurich are to my right, both howling, and I let them pass, for there are others to be dealt with. To my left is a gaunt, wolf-like figure, clad in gray rags that were once the uniform of a soldier of the German Wehrmacht. An unwanted intruder masquerading as an ally, stumbling in my wake. And then before us, we see brown forms bobbing through the night. Russians, making for the prize.

I fire while running, casings spinning forward, skipping my bullets off the pavement into explosions of fragmented lead, stone, and flesh. The gun roars with hate, and men go down. I am killing. I turn to the left, spraying. I am clubbing with my entrenching tool. Our new "friend" has his skull smashed open, and I plunge at the wound. He dies beneath my flapping tongue. I turn, panting, face slick with blood, unable to take the time to feed properly. I see Batz and Eurich grabbing at the shattered canister of salvation, oblivious of the advancing Russians, who gasp their surprise as I am suddenly amongst them, belching lead into their bodies, tearing apart their faces.

A confusing jumble of heat and stones. Batz is quickly torn in half. The blast deafens me and sets my hair on fire. Batz is screaming through a blood bubble, and Eurich just stands there. I re-load in slow motion. Always against the dirt which clutches everything in the war zone, there will be blood cutting through in greasy rivulets, channeled through chunks of gore, and leading to the mangled shell of Batz, ripped like a pillow sack as me and the Russian collide. I drive my knee into his chest, putting my weight high and locking his leg with mine in a nauseatingly intimate manner, made palatable by the sheer pedestrian level of our contact. His gun fires, burning my leg, and he goes down beneath my combat weight, which bursts his throat.

Eurich still stands, though his helmet is gone. I wonder why the mortar that killed Batz doesn’t fire again, and why Eurich stands, giggling.

"Toilet paper," he says, holding a roll aloft. A tail of white unrolls in the cordite breeze.

"Well, at least we can wipe our asses tonight!" I yell.

They sent a load of toilet paper. And I was hoping for grenades!

Eurich glares back. He doesn’t know if he should loot a corpse or run. His needs, so different than mine, make him so weak. The mortar fires again and we flee, side- stepping the ruin that once was Batz. Eurich is now sobbing, wobbling with exhaustion as we flee a hideous cacophony of Russian lead, which begins to hose the square. We retreat back through the rubble, back to our hole and for a long time we just lie there gasping at the dirt wall. Finally I get up and look around, then sit back down opposite Eurich.

We have not a drop of water, not a crumb of food. But I have to feed tonight, so my friend must die.

Eurich’s glittering eyes bore into mine, already hardening with the resolve to last another day. He is a desperate animal, cheeks sinking, lips cracked. Death would be a great favor to him. He is shuddering, rocked from within, as if a great cold had settled upon his form.

Well, after all, it was ten below zero out there!

He emits a long, low moan, closing his eyes and slumping back. I regard him closely, wondering about this bag of flesh, about the last three days, about the fact that I almost don’t want to kill him. Then my needs take over.

Eurich looks up as I take him in my grasp, moving him like you would a doll. I hear him sob. Like a flapping bat I twitter about the wound he takes, stiffening. I’m slobbering my thanks as I produce a rasp of cartilage upon my tongue, with which I lick off his skin and tear into the flesh, pushing his face into the dirt to muffle his screams. I burrow into the back of his neck, which emits a gout of thick, hot, blood. Beneath the muscle is what I’m after--the brain stem.

It’s sloppy but quick. Well, not really...

As usual, there is no summation to Eurich’s life. There is no last word, no denouement. He just dies. His life passes into mine. I grow stronger.

Later, crouched over my prey, I strip off my German uniform and throw it over Eurich’s corpse. The game is over. Still his bulging eyes peer out over the edge of the bloody cloth.

Looking at his face makes me uncomfortable. Or just his eyes, so I shut his eyes. Naked from the waist up, I make my way back to the Russian lines. You see, I had spent so much time killing Germans that I now desired to know a little more about them. I already knew how they died, but what did they scream while they died? I seemed to know their language, and I was beginning to like them more than I did the Russians I had been fighting with. After all, none of my commanders could control me, and one was trying to kill me. As I slipped through the fading night, I once again considered switching sides. I believed I could pull it off.

It was that beautiful time on the battlefield when most people tried to catch some sleep, right before the dawn. Of course, attacks still occurred and I often hunted. But tonight I was happy to slip past the guard and return to my vault beneath the battered factory. Piled with weapons and body parts, it was my home, though scaly flesh-mongers felt free to steal from me. I shoo them away and the loathsome creatures scuttle off into the walls. I slump in the corner, popping my joints and reflecting on what I had learned.

The Germans were in bad shape. Lack of food was the biggest problem for them. First they had eaten the dogs, then they had eaten the horses and mules, and finally they had eaten the rats that had grown fat feasting on the detritus of war. When the rats were gone, they had begun to eat each other. Bands of starving soldiers ruled their night, lurking, armed with clubs and shovels. They were cut off, surrounded, already sacrificed by their leader. It was perfectly natural for them to resort to cannibalism. I pitied them in the way you would a cow.

But their fate was not to be mine. I was their death in flesh. I processed the matter of their souls and would feel my strength return. Later, in the death camps, I would know more of these things, the harvesting of souls. And we would go there together.

New York. Not the nice part, the theme park, the glittering lie. The shit-hole.

I roam the streets, gazing at the ruined lives, and I wonder why. How can they live like this? The city is beyond management, out of control, rotting from within. People contemplate garbage as their children scream, restless eyes scanning crowded pavement as they pray for peace, perfect peace, and not a burgundy Chevy full of homicide. There was a heavy gunfight on the block last night, and the cops never came.

The people who live here are black. Much like millions of others, they were slowly being destroyed. At the time I was black, but merely for appearance’s sake. But I was aware of their position and empathized with their hatred. Uprooted, enslaved, they too had been sent sprawling, fatherless, into a world they had never made. They were much like myself. And in that world I lived and moved amongst them and could feel their growing hatred. But I found it difficult to interact with them. I didn’t know their slang or their customs, even though I was as black as any of them.

I didn’t like meeting people, I liked eating people.

But tonight was special. I was out, and I had to be careful of the cops. One of my biggest fears was being imprisoned. I’d live forever in solitary. After about 60 years they would start to wonder what the fuck was up with prisoner 137, the one that called himself Whargoul. Yeah--the one that wouldn’t die. Then the experiments would start. They would slice me into sandwich meat and put me in a museum. But no. The world would be dead before then.

I fly by the cubicles filled with other people’s lives. Acutely aware of their contents, I don’t think about it. I’m in the Rivera, my current favorite car. I motor, savoring the wind until it brings the sound of shrill cries-- children screaming. The cries rend my ears, my face pulsing like boiling rubber. The engine throbs, traffic surges anew, and there is nothing to do but move forward, towards the sightless corner where the screams come from. There are others behind me. They want to see. There are bulky men in uniform, trying to control the crowd, draping children about a smashed structure of steel and glass. How close the dark is to the light. Hoses wash blood into the sewer and I turn my face away, appalled. The children are being machined into food, which is distributed to the crowd.

I’M THE FUCKIN’ WHARGOUL

I’M- -THE GHOST IN MINAS MORGUL

I DESTROYED YOUR LIFE

I RAPED YOUR WIFE

I AM WHARGOUL

I AM UNCOOL

I wrote those words to make myself feel strong, to exult in the evil of my actions. But it didn’t help. I had become a beast with a conscience, addicted to and sickened by what gave me my ghastly life. Acts of mad murder, sexual gluttony, my life was a tapestry was both. Some humans know the utter mastery of the bloody blowing of chunks. Murder. Physical and mental orgasm, attainable godhead. Oh, but the price. Anyone but a monster would be horrified. But you know that the world is full of monsters.

Have you ever felt a human die? Feel the thing best called a soul slip to the ether? I felt them die. I fed off their deaths. Countless beings have died beneath my blows, my orders, my uranium-tipped bullets. Bullets that tore through steel and stone, flesh and bone. On the "Highway of Death", and the day of the dog. You do remember the Highway? I mean, everyone was so proud of what we did--but do you know what really did?

The Gulf War. Biological weapons, oil fires, massed mechanized carnage in the name of a devil with the face of a man. Still, Stalingrad made Desert Storm look like a weenie- roast. And that’s what we did. We roasted ‘em up and we ate ‘em alive.

The highway ran north from Kuwait City, all the way to Baghdad. It had been the main invasion route for the legions of Saddam, and after the Allies liberated the city it became the principle route of retreat. The highway was jammed with every conceivable type of vehicle jammed with every conceivable type of merchandise, including human beings. They could have surrendered but the temptation to loot out-weighed the instinct for survival. Planes attacked the head and tail of the column, immobilizing it. And then the real killing began.

I was flying an A-10 Warthog. Really a nasty piece of work. Heavily armed and armored, it was the ground- attack aircraft. At least that’s what they called it on the Discovery Channel. What it really was a hellish device, an infernal machine that had no place on your Earth. Inspired by devils into the minds of the privileged "clevers", as they called the humans who bargained with such beings. It was designed to rip apart flesh, spilling your soul into the maw of the harvester--me.

My wing came in low from the sea. I had just stolen this plane from an air base by rudely inhabiting the body of an American pilot. We tear past the dazzling breakers towards the fire, which engulfs the horizon. There is lots of radio chatter. Orders come in and are promptly ignored as the feast beacon calls. This wouldn’t be like sucking brain stems--I could kill thousands!

Death, a natural process. Whargoul, the fate accelerator. I recall undead lords I served. My grip curls into the stick and our three ships bolt like moths to a bug-lamp. The bugs without wings scuttle on the surface of the earth, milling about in terror and confusion. They wish they could fly.

Instruments whirl, minds boggle, turbo-charged metal claws for purchase at the fickle wind. I am this ship, this pilot. Since my awakening in the desert, my power has soared. I do not need my controls to deliver the payload into a squabble of vehicles. Men die. Women die!

Shit! They were even stealing the fucking whores!

I throw my machine at the sky. The earth moans in a six-G swoop and again I come about, turning on my electric Gattling cannon and spraying them with uranium-depleted core ammo, the spent casings of which would later bring skin cancer to the victors. A truck, hung with colorful blankets, flares and erupts--quick flash apocalypse, all for naught. Details, obscure, obscene. Configurations of metal tracing 50 years of Soviet tank design --shooting at me!

For a 30-year old tank (T-72) with its turret cranked hard right, while barreling through the clogged artery (yes, barreling, giving no heed to lesser vehicles, losing speed only to crush and roll over things. This is the way of the tank), to fire and hit my plane, moving at over 500 M.P.H. (U.S. style), with its main gun (122 mm, Soviet-style)...well, it was a million-to-one shot.

And he got it.

Now, years after the fact, I go back and replay, freezing frames of flame in torturous slow-mo. The event occurred with instantaneous force and glory. Such is the result when plane meets shell. I was up and out, glass disintegrating before the sound blew out my ears. Engulfed in burning jet fuel, I spun through space in my "titanium bathtub" (supposed to protect you) as the wasted column praised their god. My falling sun smears into the highway, and a greater secondary explosion occurs, hurling my ignited form a mile away. The speed of my passage cannot kill the flame and I collide with the yearning earth.

And yes, I do feel pain.

Much later I became aware of the soft sounds and sensations creeping in from the fringes of my being. Their was a bubbling, liquid sound. I was reforming, and was still incapable of movement. I felt wet and numb, unable to see and glad of it. Gradually I can discern a far-off sustained roar, like great engines. It’s very cold around me but great heat is emanating from within my regenerating carcass. Even in this early stage of the resurrection process I am curious as to my new being, and the space that it occupies. There is a swaying movement, translating to the orientation of up and down. I am lying on my back in a confined space, suspended in a frigid expanse of atmosphere. Sluggish alarm drifts through me but at this point I am powerless. I become one with the blackness again, passing from the world as I continue to re-form. Once again, I had survived.

That was in 1991. The year I came to America.

I was home, shooting junk. My last foray into the world of the living had been a good one, despite my encounter with the baby-killing machine. I had scored several small bags of different flavors of heroin, my substitute for morphine. I liked to sedate myself heavily and pass out in a black leather chair. It made me docile, even jolly, plus it took away my appetite. Lusting for the blood of the innocent was starting to lose its appeal. For the first time since the splendor of France, so many years ago, I did not have a war to fight. I was bored, and perhaps afraid to grapple with the curse of my future. So I stayed home and shot junk, and remembered….

My first life had begun in Stalingrad, 50 years ago. I have memories of other lives before then, but they are ancient and fused with murk. I think I had been dead a long time. Maybe they didn’t need me, or maybe they had just forgotten about me. But Stalingrad brought me back. The "greatest" battle in the biggest war ever fought was too much of a summons for any self-respecting ghoul to ignore. I assume we returned from the dead in droves. I know because I have met some of my relatives.

I came from the river, drifting from the womb to the surface, trailing discarded scraps of placenta. I didn’t know what I was. I didn’t know I was supposed to know. But I do remember that slow ride to the surface as the only truly peaceful feeling I had ever known. Birth.

A Russian patrol found me washed up on the banks of the Volga, blue, swollen and frozen stiff. I was naked, and I later found that the only reason they had taken any notice of my corpse was because of my giant prick, which was hard as a rock and pointing straight up. Apparently it was so funny that they carted me back to headquarters to take a photograph. By the time we got there, I had thawed out enough to move. Boy, were they surprised!

But they didn’t think it wasn’t funny anymore. They threw me in a cell underneath the NKVD prison. They thought I was a spy. If only I had been, then I would have known what I was. As it was, I didn’t have a clue. I was just a hairless, naked guy with a flat, broad, face and a prick that had finally thawed out.

I sat in the hole for days and listened to the guards talking down the hall. I didn’t say a word or move a muscle, even when they brought me thin gruel, which I never ate, so they stopped bringing that. I did start to grow hair. And as the days went by I heard the battle coming closer.

I came to recognize the dry rattle of the machine-gun, the banshee scream of the rocket launchers, as if they were something I was already familiar with. Like the words of my guards--I understood them perfectly. I heard my captors fret about the growing prospect of being sent to the line. Creatures known as "The Germans" were close to the city center, and threatened the district that housed the prison. The inmates were to be moved out of the city. I didn’t want to leave.

That night, planes flew over and dropped bombs on us. One hit the prison and blew the roof in. My cell collapsed into the street in a jumble of smashed men and stone. After the dust had cleared I remained sitting in the middle of it all until survivors started to stumble out of the wreckage. Some prisoners slipped away--some were shot. I saw one of my guards had also survived, and he made his way towards me. Suddenly I leapt up.

"Comrade!" I yell, moving to embrace him.

" Huh!?" he says, stepping back, raising his submachine gun. "Hey, hold it!"

I look about, apparently baffled. "Where am I?" I say, "Comrade, please tell me...my unit--where is my unit?" I speak in perfect Russian, if slightly slurred.

"Now wait you," growls the guard, leveling his gun at my chest, "What unit?"

I grow more composed and step back, raising my arms. "Of course Comrade," I say loudly. "I could be lying. I respectfully request the presence of a political commissar to take my full report. The bomb blast seems to have restored my memories, and I have information vital to the high command!"

He seems unconvinced but then an officer walks up, having heard my shouting. Before he can speak I snap to a perfect salute.

"Request permission to report, sir!" I practically scream.

He visibly flinches. " For God’s sake shut up, man! Are you deaf?"

"A little sir, the bomb and all..."

"What information were you speaking of? Where does this man come from?" he says.

"They brought him in last week. Said they’d found him by the river, near Rynok. A deserter or spy they said, but they never came back for him. Killed, no doubt. Anyway, he came in naked so we gave him a uniform. He hasn’t said a word the whole time. Looks Mongolian, if you ask me."

"Yes, that’s right, I’m Mongolian," I blurt out.

"Silence!" barks the officer. " All right, quickly give your report."

"Sir! I am Private Yorgi Stalyonavich of the 57th Rifle Division, 43rd Army. I was engaged in the defense of Rynok and killed many Huns. During the fighting I found a leather map case on a dead Nazi. I could tell it was important so I hid it in the sewer before the fascist scum overwhelmed our position. Then something big blew up and knocked me into the water. That’s the last thing I remember."

"He’s lying, sir," says my captor. " He’s a deserter who should be shot."

"Sir, my commander is Captain Gulchuk. I beg you to return with me to my unit so he may verify my words!"

It’s a good lie, pieced together from bits of information I’d been hearing all week. The growing drone of more approaching planes speeds his decision.

"All right Private," he says, casting a nervous look at the sky. "You certainly don’t look German. You can ride with my unit to the Northern District. Come with me."

Luck, lies, and unseen designs had steered me well. I was in the Russian army, holding on to the battered remnants of Stalingrad. And I was happy.

I wake again, definitely in a box. I move my hands to my face and feel smooth skin, breathe deeply with my newly formed lungs. I’m back.

It’s happened before and you can’t kill it. And every time, it gets stronger. Who knows where it came from, but its not done evolving.

It’s me! But something bad had happened, something that made me unclean. And now I hear the low piping tones of an organ, playing a sonorous dirge….

U.S. Air Force Captain John Crinkle had enjoyed an illustrious career until I caught up to him. His only combat action before the gulf had been in Grenada, where his squadron had attacked and annihilated a colony of monkeys. There were medals all around. I don’t like killing animals. How can humans claim they are superior to "beasts" that routinely see in the dark, run 70 M.P.H., and fly?

Once he dropped that cluster bomb he was hooked for life on the deadliest of highs--combat. That nauseous on adrenaline feeling was too good to resist, as if landing 20-ton jets on pitching carrier decks wasn’t exciting enough. Drug-free (didn’t even drink coffee), Crinkle was a junkie with a weapon. His jet-boy dreams turned into a full-on career, and he threw himself into his NATO training, relishing the "collapse" of the Soviet Union. Other grim tableaus were enacted, we wanted a war, and Crinkle ended up in Desert Storm.

I got him when he was out jogging in the pre-dawn mist. He was so gung-ho that he would trot far past the sentries, Colt .45 slapping the small of his muscular back. I came out of the deepest desert, my "awakening" behind me, gorged on the souls of 20,000 men. Formless, black and crackling, I moved like ball lightning towards my next encounter with fate, and he saw me coming.

He actually stopped, drew his weapon, and emptied the entire clip into me. Or rather through me. After two bullets he should have realized that the legends were true. Hot lead cannot reckon with necrotic madness, and I bore down onto him, into him, violating and invading his being, crashing into it, pushing through the pest and gristle, finding the heart and claiming it as my own.

Yet the crust was intact. I had captured good material and calmed myself within it. And when John Crinkle jogged back past the sentries it was just another day in the air war against our buddy Saddam’s crummiest cannon fodder legions. I should have known--earlier that day I’d been one of them.

I collected my men, skipped breakfast (strange for the Captain) and was on my way to a rendezvous with a tank shell. Two hours later I was a blob of burning meat beside "the highway of death". Four days later a U.S. Graves Registration team scraped me up. One week later I was attending my own funeral.

But in what form? I touch my face, and the features are unfamiliar. A feeling of amorphous rage builds within me and I lash out against the coffin lid, smashing my fist through the thick wood. I immediately feel the terror around me and it makes me stronger. Grunting, I rip the lid off and sit up, taking quick note of my surroundings. The coffin sits on an altar in the midst of a medium-sized church. My funeral is well-attended by a lot of white people who are, to say the least, surprised to see a total stranger jump out of the coffin, which was supposed to contain a lump of burnt meat--"Really Mrs. Crinkle, there is no need for you to see your son". I barely notice my new skin is black as I am instantly sick from the fluids they have pumped me full of, and I shatter the box in a flurry of wood chips and vomit. The coffin awkwardly teeters and then crashes to the floor, spilling me down the stairs. It’s all a blur as I lurch towards the aisle, the people screaming and parting, bumbling over each other in a mad panic to get away from the burbling maniac who has just ruined their funeral. Trailing splinters, I reel across the carpet, bellowing obscenities. A red-faced fool blocks my path--in an instant he is grasped by face and groin, groaning into my palm as his genitals are crushed. The stampede becomes frantic as men stomp their wives into the floor in their haste to escape.

I stand, shrieking, holding the man aloft. I snap his spine with an audible crack and hurl his broken body at the pews, bouncing him across the rows and into the retreating horde.

"WHARGOUL! WHARGOUL!" I slobber at soul-shrinking volume, wheeling up the aisle, pausing to shatter the front doors in a blow that surprises even me. I am lashed by rain--the mid-day street is evening-dark with a sudden thunderstorm. My body racked with nausea, I run into the street, bouncing through traffic. If any followed, they were greeted by a black storm that came from nowhere.

There had been a time, I was sure, when my being had inhabited a dismal swamp. Being of the devil, I was highly courted, and bound in covenant to my undead lord. I was granted power in accord with results, and rode a skeletal steed encased in once-fine mail, corroded by the tomb from which it had been wrested. My body was out of proportion with my spirit, which had been sold. When war beckoned, I followed, and found myself at the gates of the enemy castle.

‘Repent!" I scream, worms writhing across my face.

As mine was a mission of diplomacy, I was shown quarters. Here my body began to vaporize, emitting atrocious odors. My guards could not approach me as I stumbled about the room, still trying to talk to my hosts about a proposed alliance (a lie). When the flesh could no longer support itself, I crumpled to the floor, spirit shrieking back to oblivion.

Almost a dream, that. Except for the imprint of experience, like sun on your face, or dead flesh in your mouth. Horrible feelings you remember without guilt, knowing they were dreams. But then knowing they were not dreams. To be human, deprived of humanity.

I slowly drift back into consciousness until I feel steady enough to prepare another shot. I note with despair that this is the last load. After this wore off, I would have to return to the land of the living.

I ram the horse needle into my chest and shoot heroin straight into my heart, moaning in bliss as I settle back into the chair, which farts softly as it takes my 230 pounds. I really should get a catheter and do the full IV thing. I could stay knocked out for days...but who would feed the dog? He might eat me--it could be worth a shot, as I’d never been eaten. But I knew that killing myself wasn’t an alternative.

If I killed myself I could not fulfill my task--a task that which was an attempt to wrest my destiny into my own blood-soaked hands. I had set before myself a mission, a holy quest, and an act of grand redemption that might erase the ugly blot that had been my life.

Something had created me. Some sick thing had formed me from what I did not know, and had set me out upon the earth to rape and slay and maim, somehow feeding off my feeding to sustain its own hideous existence. But perhaps it did not realize that in my years amongst the humans that I might develop empathy or even sympathy for them.

I had to find my creator, and destroy it, so I might save my eternal soul.

To begin, I would have to unravel the clues of my past, things that I had forgotten in the space of my 50 years upon this planet. How had I gotten here? Who was I? What was I? This was the point of my drug- soaked, dream-drenched reveries--a search for the truth in the black pages of my mind. The more time I could spend in this manner, the better chance there was of my remembering the things I had made myself forget. Then it would be payback time.

I sink back into delirium, disappearing into myself, and notice a tangled mass of protoplasmic material. I move towards it, bumping into its gelatinous fringe. It is like discovering a cancer in yourself and the hateful energy repulses me, sending me to other regions, other times.

After WW II, I had I slipped away. I was lucky, and not overly Aryan looking. Plus I spoke several languages perfectly, and had money and papers. I had seen the end coming and had made preparations accordingly. This was my second incarnation--what I had become after Stalingrad, and in that time I had done some things--terrible, awful things. And I had felt great about doing them. It had brought me tremendous power, and earned me formidable enemies. But I needed a vacation.

So I went to France, the south of France, near the Spanish border in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It was only ten miles from the Mediterranean, and the climate was delightful. The people were simple, and it was an easy matter to procure a sun-washed villa atop a mountain with an excellent view of the only approach route. I fixed the place up and settled in, taking great satisfaction in my first real house. And I began to out-wait my fate. I began to grow old. And the older I got, the more I believed that at some point in the recent past, I had gone mad, and totally lost track of all my family and friends. It seemed reasonable and certainly preferable to an image of me behind a machine-gun, massacring prisoners. Me slobbering about in a feeding-hive. I began to fantasize about my old relatives coming to visit, and the joyous reunion, and the food they brought. It was good to have a vivid imagination because, of course, they never came. So I planted grapes, and began a modest vineyard so that when they arrived we could drink a great toast. In the meantime, I drank alone. I became quite the drunk, and cultivated specific wines to knock my ass out. That and the considerable supply of morphine ampoules I had managed to hoard. Ahh...the south of France.

My features settled at 30 to 50 years old, depending on how drunk I got. I made a lot of wine, good wine. At one point I even had a local boy helping me bottle the stuff. But he became too bright, too curious, and I had to get rid of him. I even forged a relationship with a local prostitute. A fledgling romance, sustained by occasional bouts of mad sex. Yes, I enjoyed sex, but not as much as Gabby did. She started coming over all the time!

I was convinced, as were the locals, that I was an eccentric, rich, reclusive drunk, with an old face but a young body. The hardest time to believe this was when I would run naked through the hills in the middle of the night. I would find myself atop a local precipice, howling, stripped to the primal, the shield of alcohol burned from my blood. The locals heard my screams and warned me the hills were haunted. Only I knew the truth--they were haunted by me.

In Stalingrad, it had been easy. I had fit in, becoming a legend in the city, a mercenary from nowhere with an unwavering lust for mayhem. It was all I knew and it was how I lived and besides everyone else was doing it--how could it be wrong?

They let me go, knew better than to give me orders. I would just appear out of the rubble, ammo draped around my broad shoulders, clutching an evil gun, grinning….

"Where’s the war?" I’d say.

Night fighting was my specialty. It helped being able to see in the dark. I’d take the men on the darkest ways, through the sewers. Then we’d come at them, from below, spilling into their midst in an orgy of hand-to-hand combat. We would beat, stomp and stab them to death, trying to conserve ammo. We’d quickly pillage the place for valuables-- I’d go for weapons, watches, drugs and liquor, and then return to the underworld, to my vault, where I would make obscene love to mangled corpses until I was whole. Usually, most of my men would also die. I never led them to a deliberate death, but that didn’t stop me from feeding on them if I had to. In this place it was not unheard for a thousand to die in a single day in a one building. But I was one of the few who knew where the corpses went. Figuring out the food chain, I had realized my days as a link were numbered. I had to move up or be consumed by it.

I think that’s why they killed me. That’s why I switched sides. That’s when I joined the SS.

Chapter Two

The "Shutzschtaffel", or as they are more simply known, the "SS", are best remembered as the henchmen of the Holocaust, killing upwards of 12 million in the death camps. The organization, with a lot of help, ran the camps for which the Third Reich was so famous.

But the SS also produced numerous combat divisions, which saw extensive action in Russia and the West. So while their colleagues were busy slaughtering millions behind the lines, these formations were busy killing millions in the field--resulting in an incalculable number of plundered souls.

The fighting divisions (and a full-strength division is anywhere from 8000-20,000 men) bore colorful names such as "Viking" and "Prince Eugen", but were referred to collectively as the Waffen SS. It was one of the best-equipped, trained, and motivated fighting forces ever assembled. The mailed fist of Grofaz, the Fuhrer, Adolph Hitler. To many, they were the devil and his demonic legion, set loose upon the world to slay. To my masters, they were servants of the harvest, tools to herd humans into the maw. Fire-belching titans tore up the landscape, reducing men to a fine pulp. Hitler, giving orders he could not understand, a biological construct with the will of a wind-up doll. Something touching his spine. The SS, obeying with grim fanaticism, believing themselves mystical warriors, receiving their brand-new Tiger tanks at crowded marshalling yards, a new toy in return for their oft-eternal commitment.

Training and morale were outstanding in 1943, despite Germany’s colossal defeat at Stalingrad, from which the SS had emerged unscathed. Hitler would not have wasted his pet monster in that wretched kettle. There were other plans for them, plans coming from below. Plans that made them build the camps.

SS men often bragged of their honored and elite status. They drank and talked loudly to forget the things they’d seen. They were hated and feared by all, but few Germans would shun their company on the battlefield. Most Germans, and indeed the rest of the world, sometimes even those who fought against them, tolerated, ignored, admired or even encouraged their actions. Like the fucking Pope.

They wore a grinning skull as their badge, proudly signifying themselves as servants in death’s army. They didn’t wear a star or a cross. They wanted to wear a skull. They reveled in their evil aspects, and the beast they secretly served empowered them with the unholy strength needed to commit their crimes, and later smile proudly in the face of their executioners.

And for a time, I was one of them.

After Stalingrad had ceased its corpse grinding, I made my way west, following the retreat of the Wehrmacht to Rostov. It was easy to play the wounded straggler, considering my appearance. You see, I had been subjected to a concentrated and sustained blast from a flame-thrower, as well as a considerable amount of additional abuse. This had been my first of many deaths. My flesh was growing back gray and lumpy, stretched tightly across my bones. My face was a mask of scar tissue. The ears were gone, the nose was gone, and my hair was a patch of burnt tar. Over-large teeth glared whitely through the mess. To say I was hideous was a considerable understatement.

When I first came up, after an indeterminable period of blindly questing through the flesh-sewers, I passed through a steppe village that was relatively undamaged. The only people left were old women. When they saw me they began screaming and ran away. I stumbled behind, pleading for directions. Soon after I was picked up by a German patrol who were truly appalled at my appearance, so much so that they were tempted to shoot me. All I could do was sob and collapse into their arms. My charred and bloodied uniform made me a German soldier but that was it. Wrapped in a Wehrmacht blanket I grin all the way to the hospital, apparently near-death but filled with glee.

The hospital was in an old school on the western edge of Rostov. It was a quiet area except for the screams and pleadings of the wounded. I gazed languidly at them as I was carried in, delighting in their misery. I was taken to a burn ward, and here I stayed, in a bed, twitching and clawing at my sheets. Officers came to question me but I would just stare back with my ruined face until they grew nervous and left. I was a horribly wounded man who had lost his mind trying to walk home from Stalingrad, and that was good cover.

I was very impressed by the Germans and their nurses, especially this buxom blonde from Heidelburg who ran our wing. She was nice to me, especially when she changed my bedpan, which I filled with a pungent green discharge, confounding the doctors. The Germans were more organized than the Russians were and I couldn’t just slip into the ranks. My best bet was to continue to grow flesh and pretend to be brain-damaged until opportunity beckoned. I never spoke, just moaned until I got drugs. I lay and drooled, and healed. In fact my rate of tissue regeneration was quite rapid, and the doctors were astounded. I began to eat their food, though I didn’t need it. All the while, men were dying around me, and I was becoming stronger. But I wanted to make a real turd for Nurse Faber, whose name I could now whisper. She put up a curtain to give me more privacy. I think I knew what it was really for. She had the hots for me.

My ears had healed enough for me to eavesdrop again. It was good to know my ultra-senses still worked. In this way I discovered the SS Obersturmbannfuhrer was coming to visit. My heart leapt!

Nervously, I began to count down the days until the Nazi party. Nurse Faber could tell I was excited, as I had ceased soiling myself. There would be no more of that.…

Through a crack in the curtain I could see a great swastika banner hung on the wall. Preparations went on for a full day before the event. Many pastries were baked, and a special sausage was unpacked.

I bellow in the middle of the night. When the nurse arrives I am staring straight at her, covers thrown back, my relatively unburned penis draped across my leg, oozing juice.

"Ach de leiber!" she says into her tiny fists, scuttling out to spread the rumors of my size, rumors that would reach the ears of Nurse Faber, and perhaps even the SS man. I wanted both of them to know I was of good stock.

Finally came the night before his arrival. I lay there, assimilating flesh from the soul-fume, stroking my tool until Nurse Faber slipped through my curtain, bearing a hypodermic needle between her fragrant breasts.

My worm-like lips writhe into a ghastly smile as she administers the dose. Its a huge one, much too big...my vision melts into a blissful, roaring vacuum and I spin into a warm and furry oblivion. It's experiences like that one that have left me deeply addicted to all manner of drugs.

After a time, I start to drift back in to hear a confused babble of voices.

"This is the man from Stalingrad?" says a sharp, accusatory voice. "The man who walked over 500 kilometers?"

"Yes, Mein Herr. We thought it best to keep him separate." This is Nurse Faber, and this is not my room.

"Well perhaps you think too much, Nurse!" he suddenly bellows, then just as quickly grows suave. "Or perhaps you think of...inappropriate things. Jewish things. Perhaps you should think more of preparing your body for the rigors of Aryan pregnancy. The Fuhrer has willed it!"

"I merely meant that he was sometimes violent -".

"He is a soldier! He is supposed to be violent! He is a hero! And he is to be treated with glorious consideration, not hidden away like some freak!"

There are other men in the room, and I can smell their guns. He walks to them, slowly putting on a pair of leather gloves with his back to the rest. Then he snaps about, clapping his hands with a thunderous report.

"I want him and all the rest I have chosen ready to move tomorrow at dawn." We must get these poor wretches out of your hospital and back into combat where they can be men again. You destroy their spirit!"

His boots, followed by a swarm of others, thunder away.

I had done it! I was headed back to combat. He had called me "the man who had walked from Stalingrad." He knew about me. Feeling flushed with delight, I decide to celebrate. Celebrate by heaping abuse upon a helpless unfortunate. The woman who had almost prevented me from meeting my hero. The woman I longed to rape. Nurse Faber.

That night I take a little life from a man in the opposite bed, a little too much...and he dies.

I am very strong now. My sinewy arms, not yet fully formed, could still snap necks. I can smell Nurse Faber in the hall, preparing to leave after a 20-hour stint. When she does, I rise quickly and place the corpse from dinner in my bed. Then I’m out the window, scuttling down the wall and dashing across the yard to a copse of trees beside the road. I hear her bicycle coming, the urgent squeak it makes powered by the svelte calves of Nurse Alexandra Faber. In her self-assured way she has, as usual, left without her guard. Her hair, a shimmering blonde wake behind her lovely face, which is alert and poised and suddenly terrified as I rush out of the darkness, clamping one hand over her mouth and grabbing the bike with the other. Then I run, holding her beneath my arm and her bike in the air. Despite her struggles, I run until I am at the river, in the bushes that border its depth. Here the bike finds its grave.

She is on the ground recovering from the chokehold and I wait until she is aware of what’s happening. Her hair is tousled, her shirt ripped open. The mouth is wet, with a piece of straw stuck to the saliva on her cheek.

I slowly wrap a length of gauze about my peeling head.

"Don’t scream," I hiss, hiking up my pajamas.

She would have if she’d had the breath. She does succeed in making a noise, a sound full of many different emotions but most palatably pure fear. Then my hand is on her mouth, her teeth sinking into my palm. My blood squirts into her as I snatch away her clothing. She fights fiercely, writhing her naked body against me as I force myself into her, bulling her into the dirt. It usually takes me a long time to come so I immediately lay into her at a frenzied clip, hitting her hard with my whole torso and grinding my balls into the mud. I keep my eyes closed, much preferring the image of her bustling about in her nurse outfit, and fuck her with incredible speed and impact. I feel our asses sliding across the bank of the stream and into the bushes as frightened animals thrash away. By now I have pistoned my full length into her, the slamming action creating vacuum. Chunks of soil and small rocks are humped into her, and my shaft began to swell with molten cum. An exploding sun slowly passed the length of my obese penis. It felt like sperm was falling out of me for several minutes as my body twisted against her unseen form, filling places deep within her with my excessive load. Then I collapse upon her.

In my defense I must say that I was not really aware that rape was wrong. I had learned about sex from the whores in Stalingrad. They liked getting raped.

Alexandra Faber was the first unwilling sexual victim I had ever encountered, and it was when I heard her crying beneath me that I realized I had done what some would call a "bad thing." I equated crying with soldiers weeping over their dead friends. I didn’t do it or understand it. But now it filled me with panic and remorse.

So I break her neck with a twist that kills her in a split-second. Dragging her corpse under the surface of the water, I weigh it down with rocks. Still her arms rise, wraith-like, from the deep, as if she were still seeking my murderous embrace. So I pile her bicycle on top of the corpse and sneak back into the hospital, getting some new pajamas and putting the dead man back in his bed. As usual, I don’t sleep.

The truck arrived at dawn. It was cold, March 1943. I was still fumbling with my feelings about the whole Alex thing. I had never felt bad about killing someone before.

The truck trundled up, piloted by a couple of soldiers. The inmates picked by the Obersturmbannfuhrer stood there by the side of the road. I noted with relief the driver and his companion were members of the SS Totenkopf Division, the Death’s Head Division. Even through the dust they had a superior air, as they climbed down from their vehicle and approached the wretched mass of wounded men. Their guns were leveled towards us, and for a moment I thought they were going to open fire.

"Get in!" one screams.

I fairly leap in, followed by the shuffling others. A Wehrmacht man with a crutch starts asking questions.

"What’s this, Corporal? You notice I outrank you," he says to the young SS man. "Several of these men are under my command. And we will not mount until we report to our Division."

"Yes Sergeant, I see…." replies the driver, expertly driving his boot into the Sergeant’s balls, who doubles over and receives a kick to the temple. As he collapses in the road, the other SS man quickly walks up, produces a pistol and holds it to the man’s bleeding head. He turns back to us.

"Get in!" he screams.

We bounce along, my usual cheery demeanor restored. The other men don’t talk to me, but they can’t help but look. They can’t help but notice how quickly my flesh is restoring itself, like worms weaving into each other to form a living tapestry of meat. Rude masses of scabby tissue form into the beginnings of a face, and my hands begin to thicken. But I needed a good feed.

I peer through a flap at the passing land. It was place I’d only just been exposed to, rolling, wooded country, not like the steppe lands I wandered, and nothing like Stalingrad. I wasn’t sure if I liked it. It smelt clean--and I’d never known clean. But then the blackened buildings and empty towns appear, and the far- off and skeletal remains of Rostov jutting out of the horizon denote a return to the war-zone.

Suddenly we pull up in the middle of a German army supply dump. There is a lot of activity around us but we don’t have time to observe as we are chased into a large tent. Here, we are given new boots! We also get a greatcoat, helmet, a belt and some rations.

"Listen!" yells the driver, whose name was Kranz. "You will be returned to your units. But in the meantime, you are indentured to the SS Totenkopf Division, owing us the sum of 58 marks for your new coat and boots. You will follow my orders, and the orders of any member of the Division, to the point of death. Fail to do so and you will be shot. Say nothing of what your duties are to anyone. Fail to do so and you and your family will be shot."

"We will make you," says the other one, Wotten, in an almost singsong whisper. "…shoot...your own family."

We load the truck with rifle and machine-gun ammo. I can see tanks at a welding shop and great piles of supplies covered with vast camouflage nets. The soldiers watch and smoke. I work and listen.

"We must get up there quickly." says Kranz. "We’ll miss all the fun..."

"To have them in your sights, at your mercy, cowering and crying, yet you are unable to carry out the task...the Obersturmbannfuhrer will be very upset," says Wooten in that same cooing tone.

Kranz shoots him an ashen look. "That won’t happen," he says stiffly, fingering his throat. "Work faster, you sons of whores!

The men tie all the flaps of the truck down and tell us not to look out, as we crowd in behind the crates. Soon we are flying down the road, bouncing down a degrading scale of rutted passages until I can hear the unmistakable ripping sounds of German MG’s. Soon my companions also hear and begin to exchange nervous glances. The fire is constant, heavy, and unanswered. There are occasional pauses and during one of these we pull up very close to where the guns are.

Suddenly, a wave of pleasure washes over me, jerking my back straight and causing my head to begin burning. My flesh crawls with ravenous delight.

The guns spit again, a long vicious lashing, and I feel a great death near. I grab several cases of ammo and push through the back flap, depositing them and leaping back for more. I stay up in the gate, shoveling out crates and staring wildly into the woods that surround us. The air is thick with cordite smoke, but there is no burning, no shellholes, no dead cows lying wasted in the field. Then the guns crash silent again, and I feel men sink to earth, feel souls spent. There, through that belt of trees, that is where it is happening.

Kranz walks up.

"No need to worry. Just killing Jews." he says.

Other soldiers begin to move the ammo off through the woods, towards the killing zone. I make a move to follow but Kranz interdicts. It takes all my self-control not to tear his throat out as I reel back towards the truck, staring madly at the dark spaces between the trees. Machine-guns bark again and the guards snap their heads towards the sound, startled. I see this and leap straight up into a tree, not stopping until my head pierces the canopy, and for one moment I behold the clearing beyond the thicket. One moment to hold forever, one titanic feeding I am denied as others glut. I drop back to the ground in full view of one the men of my squad, jumping back into the truck before his stupefied face can ask a question.

A Kubelwagen occupied by a Hauptsturmfuhrer and two soldiers pulls alongside and orders our truck to follow him to the dump. They joke a little about all the Jews they have killed, and then we drive off. The men stare morosely at the floorboards, contemplating what they had been party to.

In the field there had been a great ditch, filled with corpses. Close to the ditch, which was easily 100 meters long, was a stockade filled with victims. Parties of what they had called "Jews" were driven, nude, from the stockade into the ditch, where they made to stand atop the freshly slain. Then they were shot. Other ditches were being dug and still others were being sealed over. All this I took in with a glance.

We had brought over 30,000 rounds to the scene, where they were running out of bullets. It was vast, a new form of killing, different than combat in that there was no energy wasted in conflict, just power gained by unhampered feeding.

The beast I served apparently was not sated by mere war--it craved genocide.

The mere brushings of the power fringe had refreshed and charged me--now I yearned for the embrace of lustful violence--an embrace I would now receive.

As we roar across a wooden bridge a sudden explosion kicks the truck into the air. A huge mine ignites the span beneath us as the truck dances atop the fireball, poised yet failing, slipping through space made cruel by flame and splintered wood, which enters our abode, rending and burning. Men fly out the back or sprawl into the burning canvas. All scream.

I burst through the tarp, kicking away from the flying juggernaut as it plummets to the bottom of a bleak ravine, crumpling with impact as it is showered by falling timbers. The men are tossed about like toys--some burn in the wreck while others thud into the ground with audible splinterings. All of them die--Kranz, Wotten, and the man who saw me jump. I relax and mostly absorb my fall, though ribs crack and my breath is knocked out of me. I’m still aware enough to keep moving, avoiding the landslide of rubble even as I look for dying men on which to feed. I stand, and my broken thighbone rudely juts out of leg. I dully regard its snapped end as a great cloud of smoke rushes upon me, as does my pain. I slump, gasping, feeling the burnt souls sluice past me but lacking the focus to absorb them.

I lie there, watching the bridge burn. I can’t see the Kubelwagen but as it was ahead of us there was a good chance they made it. Then to confirm my suspicions I hear the cough of a Russian MG from above the far lip of the ravine, answered by the submachine guns of the officer’s guard.

Even far behind the front, Russian partisan groups conducted operations. It seemed obvious we had just been operated on. I begin to drag myself to the far wall but freeze in a patch of smoldering grass as I see figures attempting to stealthily make their way towards me and the wreck. Four figures clad in scraps of camouflage and civilian clothing, holding obsolete weapons as they came to loot or capture or kill. Partisans. I lay motionless, close to a pair of other bodies as they approach, gaining courage as they scan the scene and see only death.

From above, the firing continues. They move quickly, these three men, one old, and one woman, just a girl. A family operation. Maybe that’s Mom on the machine-gun.

"Quick, check those bodies- we must get back to Gregor." spits the old man. "The evil ones will come soon!"

With a blood-curdling howl I leap to my feet, paralyzing the group with shock, jumping at and grabbing one man by the coat, hoisting him aloft and tearing into his face. Hot blood jets forth as I ram my tongue into his eye socket, holding him close like a shield. His companions scream as I madly hop with his struggling body, clawing out until I scoop the girl into my death-dance. I grasp both of them by the skulls, my nails digging into their scalps. I bring them together with a brain-dashing wallop, shedding the "ism" of their beings, which gurgles down my arms and into my hide. I hold my victims aloft, cackling insanely.

The old man runs forward, crying, raising an ancient Wembly pistol, which misfires and explodes in his face, sending lead into his brain and him to a deserved rest.

The remaining son, who has now seen his entire family die at one time or another, throws his gun down and runs for the opposite wall. I release the bodies, which drop in bloody heaps at my feet, still emitting the fume, which begins to mutate my form, cracking my mouth at the corners as pus spews down my molten face. Bones are becoming spines, spines are becoming talons, which pursue the sobbing lad, slicing his coat and the flesh beneath into flapping chasms of scarlet ichor, releasing energy which I devour and in doing so become whole. Then I’m up the wall in a series of bounds, my leg holding in place through sheer strength of muscle as my bone re- knits. Atop the slope a grassy plain stretches away, a road bisecting its expanse. In the ditch beside this road sits the Kubelwagen, a squat gray bug behind which two men cower from the partisan MG, which is projecting death from the low-rise 300 meters away. It fires again, tracers lashing, tearing the hood off the buggy and kicking up dirt around a corpse in the road. There is a muffled thud and the vehicle begins to burn, as I begin my patented "crab-scuttle", moving towards the enemy, through the waist-high grass that renders me invisible. My joints become elastic, adapting to the movement as I move towards the rise. I don’t have to look, I can hear and smell them. They are packing up the MG, satisfied with their work and desiring safety--two of them.

About 20 meters away I rapidly accelerate and start to rise up. I hit full speed and leap into the air, flying over a patch of brush and sighting my prey right in front of me--two brown clad men crouched over a half-disassembled Maxim gun. They look up and perfectly expose their throats as I flash between them, trailing two fingernails and landing ten feet away, turning to compare the identical qualities of the two wounds I have delivered, running to them to admire the fact they both die at once. I slobber at the wounds, now glutting myself.

"Gregor..." I croak, sucking and questing for the magic juice.

Finally, I am satiated, no longer hungering and fused with power. The bodies I search and I take a flask of liquor, powerful peasant stuff. I smash their heavy weapon and jog to the Kubelwagen. The vehicle has been charred and still emits lazy sweeps of flame. The man in the road is dead, shot through the chest. I see the grinning skull on his tunic and know he is a member of the Totenkopf SS. A large amount of blood has come out of him and he has assumed a deflated look. Behind the vehicles there are two more bodies, another soldier and the SS Haupsturmfuhrer. The soldier’s jaw has been knocked off and his legs set afire. The officer seems to be sleeping, with his cap knocked off, and only a small wound to his forehead. He has the look of a staff officer, with a brown leather attaché case clutched in a gloved hand. I look more closely at him, into him, and detect life still within his frame, life lurking at the edges of his being, unsure of where to go.

Quickly I bandage his head wound, which is small but producing lots of blood. I sense metal in his head, but manage to stop the bleeding. I grab some clips and a SMG, then gently swing the Haupsturmfuhrer onto my shoulder, tucking his case into my coat and making my way back towards the depot, loping along like an ape, moving beside the road through the brush. I cover a lot of ground until I see the approaching dust cloud of a panzer recon column--two armored cars and a half-track sent undoubtedly to investigate that explosion that was heard as far away as Lyosk! But the first thing they find is me, covered in blood, in the middle of the road. I’m holding the Haupsturmfuhrer, and I wave them down.

A head appears above the armor plate and removes its goggles. It talks.

"What happened? Is that Haupsturmfuhrer Frederick?"

"Back at the bridge...ambush." I slowly wave back where I had come from, and then turn back to them.

"All dead..." I say.

I return the attaché case (filled with stuff about me) as they load up the officer and take off. He’ll live. An armored car takes me to the ambush site. I show them the bodies and tell them the story in as few words as possible. The leader, a short, dark man with a puzzled and suspicious face, listens in silence. I show them the wounds I made with my hands. They seem impressed, even fearful. We retrieve the SS dead, strapping them to the hull.

"Well, it all makes sense except for you," says the leader as he draws himself up before me, lighting a cigarette. He seems brave.

I slowly turn to him and then find his eyes. My own are dead smudges, lumps of coal that smolder with an interior heat, all pupil. He tries to hold my gaze, but looks away. I look at the driver and bore into his head with them. I speak slowly, towering over all, dominating.

"I was wounded." I say louder. " They said I’d lost my memory. I don’t know my name or my unit, but they said that I had walked out of Stalingrad."

The crew stares at each other and me incredulously. I tilt my head back and rasp out a long breath to the sky. Far-off thunder rumbles, artillery.

"I know I am German. I know I want to kill...," I search for the word, "Jews. I know I want to join the SS."

My eyes turn to the nervous commander, as I spread my stained hand towards him in a pained yet eloquent gesture.

"What else must I know?" I say.

I became a servant of Death’s Head. My condition was judged fit, if unusual. The accepted report was that I was a German soldier still suffering from the effects of acute amnesia, caused by wounds inflicted during the retreat from Stalingrad. I had been burned badly, to the point of deformity, but I was otherwise totally recovered. Indeed, my appearance enhanced my performance. All that remained in me was an unswerving desire to kill. Knowing what I did, I displayed considerable aptitude. They needed me, and I ended up in "Das Reich" SS Panzer Division.

I was sullen and resolute, wearing the "speckled egg" camouflage of the SS trooper. Too big for tanks, it was my job to give them support, and I rode atop them from place to place, destroying all. Using cover, I would engage enemy infantry with flame-throwers and demo charges, moving beyond the Panzers who would sit in a dominant position and deal with the enemy armor at long range. Our success would signal the next advance of the tanks behind us, and we would shelter in the debris of our making, gasping our thanks. At such times we would smoke, and find great comfort sprawled out in the mud, observing the approach of our friends, the tanks, becoming ever larger, sounding as if they were about to shake themselves apart at any moment. Dragons. They roared by and we followed.

Of course, the Russians continually strove to upset our plans. The space of earth had been altered in that towns, rivers, and woods had been suffused with new, sinister purposes. This fine road that had taken much produce to market now became the perfect enfilade to send blazing shot into advancing ranks.

Ahh...to burn to death inside a tank. A tank is basically a rolling bomb, heavily protected but a bomb nonetheless. A bomb which four or five men might live within, packed alongside ammo and gas. You get a tank and train in it for months within the closely monitored confines of the armored proving ground, working with your crew well in advance of their deaths and forging a rude yet elaborate empathy with them. It seemed that perhaps it was not totally meaningless. You went to war on a train, your tank lashed to a flatcar. You and your men, drunk, gambling. Camp life in a strange country. Blubberingly asinine revelations, twisted by drink. A local girl who gave not one shit about nations. Rumors. Then orders. Movement, always at night. Thousands of people moving around you at all times, yet unseen, from the homey confines of your tank. Doodles would sprout across the walls; stashed food and dirty socks would transform the metal edges. You could cook potatoes next to the exhaust duct.

I stand beneath an unyielding expanse, a canopy of sky. I could turn 360 degrees and still see the same thing, endless blue sky broken by flat brown plains. Springtime in Russia, and only a few clouds dot the infinite vista. The steppe land rolls away in all directions, alive with scrub and the occasional copse of trees. There is warmth upon my clammy face, a pleasant feeling which would sometimes bring back unwanted emotions like pity, or fear. But the breath becomes a diesel fart as my Panzer section rolls by. We are fielding PZ- IV’s, and I hoist my demo charge, trotting behind. Other elements in the Battalion are fielding the new " Panther" tank, which looks like a heavier version of the Russian T- 34, a beast we all fear. But they say the Panther’s gun is better. We do not know because these machines are untested in combat. Rushing these tanks to the front may have been a mistake. These "wonder weapons" seem to belch flame out of their exhaust every time you start them. Several have broken down already, and one’s engine has caught afire.

Many idiotic details are discussed as our section takes lunch. Water trucks come up and a field kitchen is organized. We can see elements of our division and others fanning out on our flanks, and the men cheer as a formation of Stukas thunder over, their wings sprouting "tank-buster" 37mm cannons. It was quite a show. The shattered legions, which had reeled back from the winter’s debacle, had been quickly replenished by new formations. Mine was one of them. By spring, 1943, OKW was ready to resume offensive operations in central Russia. And now, on the plains surrounding the city of Kursk, our armored fist stood poised to smash.

"How quickly can all this go to shit?" I say to Kepler, who is scribbling in his book.

He looks up and smiles.

"Scary, sit..." he says, re-arranging objects on his ground roll. They call me "Scary", for lack of a better name, "they" being the few men in the battalion who would dare talk to me. I sprawl out next to Kepler, staring outwards into oblivion.

"Murder, murder, murder," I muse. "Why can’t we have some rape?"

"High Command has decided that we fight better if our balls are full." Kepler says.

"Seems like a waste of good sperm. We should organize a company circle-jerk."

I liked Kepler. He was perceptive, humorous, and not intimidated by my grotesque appearance. They called him "the poet" because he was constantly scribbling in a black sketchbook, which he would suffer no one to look at. Because of this, many in our outfit considered him odd and anti-social. He was actually quite talkative; he just didn’t like talking to stupid people. One time Big Carl, an ex-circus strongman from Essen, stole his book. Two days later Carl was dead, apparently murdered by partisans. Three days later Kepler was scribbling away again. I don’t know who had killed Big Carl, but Kepler was my friend.

We sit in silence and gaze at the parade of steel, which surrounds us. It is a huge operation; the biggest since Stalingrad, and we’re really amazed at how fast the Wehrmacht has bounced back. But what really is amazing is that as morale soars, and as this awesome juggernaut crawls forward, everybody seems to have forgotten that the Russians are out there.

We are ordered into platoons and then addressed by our squad leader, Sgt. Pitz. He is a bear of a man, fearless in combat, inexplicably violent away from it, qualities that doom him to die. A decomposing Russian head adorns the front of his half-track, and someone has put a cigarette between the moldering lips. Pitz grabs it, and the guy’s lower lip falls off. Lighting the stub, he turns to the men.

"Today we will strike a death blow to the Red Army! Due to our recent successes in this area, the Russian line has bulged out in a great salient around the city of Kursk. We stand upon the southern edge of this salient." He turns and takes the severed head in his hands, holding it at waist level. Flies follow.

"Today we attack!" he says, delivering a drop kick to the head, sending rotting chunks of flesh and dislodged maggots into our ranks. The head flies into a nearby gully, where a dog pees on it. The ranks roar with laughter.

There follows more inane chatter as the men take heart in foul jokes and meaningless maps. The general point is to drive north, destroying all in our path, until we link up with the units driving south. This will cut off thousands of Russians and restore stability to the front. The prisoners will be herded to the rear and processed into a more manageable form. This is the plan anyway. Regardless of our success or failure, death will triumph.

Finally, we mount up on half-tracks and crowd onto the metal benches. We smoke, and I pass around a flask of vodka. As we drink the fiery stuff, we hear the first rumblings of far-off artillery fire. The armored plates are folded down, effectively blinding us. We bounce along in our darkened box, and the noise of the barrage grows steadily louder. Each report rouses us all the more until they sound very close, and the sharp crack of our tank cannons can be discerned. Pitz is at the door, trying to anticipate the moment that they will unload us. Dirt clods and spattering steel rain upon our rolling coffin, which suddenly drops down a steep grade and slews to a halt, as we bounce off each other in a clatter of weapons and equipment.

The doors screech open-- a gush of cordite pours in as we pour out, Pitz screaming at us. We are at the bottom of a gully; smoke all around but covered from enemy fire, which lashes across the sky above. We advance down the defile as the MG section sets up near the lip and the tanks take position in the shallower areas of the ditch, with only the great turrets exposed.

How do I feel? Like I’m on my way to score drugs. I’ve been cooped-up for weeks and haven’t been able to feed. I need to do so in a manner that will leave me with enough strength to be comfortable until my next action. I need to kill as many men as possible, just in case the next battle was not for some time, though on the Russian Front that usually was not the case. I grind my teeth and move faster, sensing a great slaughter coming. I have lived in shadows since my last transformation, and now I feel it falling away from me like vapor. I sense the enormity of this happening and howl, sending my sense out, feeling the shape of the battlefield and the positions of the enemy.

We have reached the first of Ivan’s defensive belts. It stretches directly across our line of advance, first consisting of mines, then wire, then anti-tank ditches. Amongst and beyond are trenches and tunnels, dugouts and revenants, and worst of all pillboxes made of concrete reinforced with steel. The approaches to this area are well-coordinated with the gunsights of the Red Army artillery and the bombsights of the Red Air Force, and of course the entire place was infested with Red Army ants.

The lead element of our battalion is already engaged. I hear small arms fire and grenades exploding from around the bend in the defile. There is a strong point here and the first assaults have failed as is evidenced by the groaning men with their guts hanging out. I move to the assault position with several others, Kepler amongst them.

"Stick close,"I say.

Our tanks plaster the fort with high explosive and smoke and we move out to destroy it. The man ahead of me suddenly explodes as he steps on a land mine, plastering me with scraps of flesh and cloth. I blink away the blood and take off, knowing exactly where not to step. Swirling smoke clouds, rent by orange bursts as they fire blindly through it, obscure the fort. Its good enough to kill the man next to me, and I suck in the fume of his death as I pause to prime my demo charge, bullets kicking up dirt around me. Hurling a 40-pound charge at my tormentors, I eat earth.

WHOOM! It is an appalling soundtrack.

In the seconds following the explosion, anyone within 50 meters is knocked senseless except for me. But I’m up at once; blood streaming out of my nostrils and ears, moving through the huge gap in the wire my charge has created. I run past the firing apertures and around the back of the pillbox, ripping the door off the hinges and leaping within. I use my shovel.

Kepler appears at the door, as I’m finishing up. What can you say? I grin, bursting with vigor, and slip past him. We’ve broken into the defensive belt, and the Russians are beginning to abandon their positions. Some are running across the fields and others are surrendering. I amuse myself by shooting people from a position of relative safety. They run faster, terrified by my accuracy. I shoot them one-by-one and then have a smoke. It hadn’t been very difficult to crack this first belt. It was almost like they gave it to us, and I begin to smell a trap. Then Kepler is behind me.

"You killed eight men in there!" he exclaims.

"I most certainly did not!" I say, feigning concern. "Two of them were women" (Russian women often fought alongside their men).

He just stands there slowly shaking his head. He is a perceptive one and at that moment I think he knows what I am or at least what I am not.

"You better get down," I say, pulling his legs out from under him.

There is a sudden, savage shrieking. Stalin’s organs, as we call them by the hideous music that they make. The pipes of hell blaze martial glory as our position is enveloped in 200 mm rocket projectiles.

The earth turns over in a shuddering tongue of soil, which buries me alive and just as quickly disinters me, slapped senseless by the concussions. My helmet is torn off, my body lacerated by flaming steel. When I come to I am being dragged by the heels towards a truck full of bodies, leaving crushed and bloody grass behind me.

"I’m not dead, you bastards!" I snarl, jumping up and weaving away.

Ivan’s reason for giving up this position is now obvious--they wanted to trap us in a pre-registered barrage. As soon as we had taken the place, they pulverized it, caring not if they killed their own men in the process. The rocket attack is over but shells are bursting all around us. Men stagger about as if drunk, missing pieces of clothing and occasionally limbs. The landscape is covered in dead dogs and scraps of ragged flesh, burning equipment and scattered personal effects. We’ve been hurt, and I can’t find Kepler or Pitz. Luckily our tanks have escaped damage and are now moving up. It takes about an hour to consolidate our position and during this time I grow almost frantic as I search for Kepler. I see Pitz squatting in a trench, only his head visible. When I get closer I see only his head is remaining, propped against a rock. The rest of his body is nowhere to be seen, though I can smell it. But I do finally find Kepler sitting next to a slew of dead Russian prisoners, scribbling madly in his book, which he snaps shut at my approach. I thud to the ground next to him, smiling stupidly.

At this point I am bubbling with glee, eyes glazing over as thousands draw closer to the point of their deaths. The battle is raging all around us for hundreds of square miles. Above, the Luftwaffe is striving to keep the air clear of Russian Sturmovik ground-attack craft. We sit in silence with each other, listening to the roaring maelstrom, which surrounds and threatens to engulf us. Finally orders come to move out. We load again into the half-tracks, and button up.

"I give up!" exclaims Kepler, his features assuming a bemused and livid look. "We have just lived through a scene most unprecedented in the annals of carnage. I can’t figure out what the hell I am doing here, why I became a part of this madness, but you--you seem to enjoy it!"

BLAM! A shell, close, rattles our armor. Kepler begins to laugh hysterically, tears of blood rolling down his face from a small scalp wound, and he removes his book from his tunic, thumping its anonymous black cover. "I just can’t do it justice--its really quite insane! A story about some sort of ghoul who feeds on war. The fucking Whargoul!"

We cringe as one as we hear Russian engines above. The vehicle twists violently, weaving to avoid attack, sending us sprawling into each other.

"You are the new squad leader!" Kepler screams.

For an answer I leap to the cupola and unbutton the steel hatch, wrenching the MG around in time to see a group of Sturmoviks being chased off by a flight of ME-109’s. There is a burning half-track alongside of our own and men spill out, aflame. My tongue sprouts out of my mouth like an erection, a divining rod whose length crawls with delight. Around me, all rushing forward, are more armored vehicles than I have ever seen. It’s truly magnificent, surpassing the legions of Pharaoh, or Caesar, or the mighty Khan. Everywhere are Tigers, Panthers, PZ-IV’s, armored cars, half-tracks and hulking assault guns. Endless infantry, some mounted, some afoot. The sky, so clear earlier, is now black with smoke as we move towards what appears to be a sea of flame blocking the horizon. We are approaching the second defensive belt. The Russians have dug huge pits filled with logs, which they have set aflame, thus channeling our advance into their killing zones. We are already running afoul of mines and tank traps, as the air battle above us increases in ferocity. It is impossible to determine who is winning, so darkness takes the day, before we can begin to assault the second belt.

At that point we did not know that there were twenty more beyond it. The Russians had known our supposed "secret" plans for months, and they had been busily preparing for our arrival.

Worse still, we knew that they knew, and we didn’t care. That was part of the plan.

Chapter Three

Walking through the city at night I search for a meal, and pizza just won’t do. I have a special need and a new plan, and am confident in my ability to pull it off. Usually I don’t kill this close to my fort but tonight I’m going to, for reasons I don’t yet understand. After all, there were murders every night anyway, and nobody gave a damn.

Slinking down a trash-strewn alley I see a group of young toughs approaching me. I have taken the look of a vagrant tonight and they spot me as an easy victim upon which to vent their hate. I let them surround and beat me, and fall to the ground laughing.

"Stop--you’re tickling me to death." But then one pulls out a knife and I have to hurt him, whirling him around by his legs and using him like a human club.

"Go on, get outta here," I say as I hurl him out of his sneakers and after his retreating companions, knocking them over like a set of bowling pins.

"Go beat up some white people!" They do.

Twenty minutes later I am slumped next to a rotting tenement from which the howls of a forgotten baby echo. For all to see is yet another broken life, sprawled out on the pavement, wrapped in puke-smeared clothing, drooling bile and stinking of excrement. Most people give me a wide berth and that is just how I want it. For it gives me time to settle into myself, drawing my life force deep into my chest, leaving my limbs cold and useless. Nothing moves except the trail of viscous barf running down my chin, but inside my guts churn as I begin to extend myself down the interior length of my right arm. Truly an uncanny experience to house your conscience in your elbow and sense your own head as a spectator would. But there was no time for reflection--my hunger beckoned and I continue the journey within myself until I had placed all that I needed in my right index finger, which no longer looked like an index finger.

I detach myself from myself with a crunching sound and begin crawling up the wall. I am a worm with six legs per side, ending in hooked claws with which I scurry quickly up to the third floor. Through a broken pane of glass I gain entrance to the baby chamber and then the urine-soaked cardboard box which serves as its crib. The baby’s cries become shriller as my lamprey-like mouth begins to bore into its skull through the ear canal, seeking the sweetness that only an infant’s brain can bestow. The sound of grinding cartilage fades into that of squishing pulp. The screams become silent as the child’s life force passes into me.

My surrogate container cannot handle the energy for long--I must return to myself and deposit my load. Squirming out of the brainpan through the bloody pothole I’d chewed, I scuttle back, across the room and down the wall to reattach myself to my hand. I transfer what I need to lurch to my feet and stumble from the area. In about twenty minutes I feel and look like myself again, basic black Whargoul. My hunger has abated, for the time being.

My experiment had worked better than I’d hoped, though it had taken over an hour. Transmutation was a useful ability to have, though it was often unpredictable. I was always learning new things about myself. Like how when I kill babies, I stayed sated longer. And when I stayed full, I didn’t have to go kill people. Generally speaking a baby, even a crack baby, is worth three or four adults. The younger the human, the sweeter the taste, the longer the high. So I was cutting the humans some slack. Besides, what kind of life did that kid have in store for it anyway?

Funny how you can rationalize just about anything....

"Did I dream it?" I wonder as I stare across the drifting desert plains, where I had been on station with my new unit for two weeks. Did I dream about my youth, like I dreamt about my death, and all the life in-between? Had I been a child, toiling on shining plains, working endlessly but not thinking it cruel? It was the way my village had existed for centuries, and I did not question the orders of my father.

I dreamt that I had a father, other than my Father.

If we wanted to eat and stay warm we had to work, and work hard, and I saw nothing in my future but becoming my father one day, with my own children, probably living in this same house. And if the party men took too much from us at the end of our harvest, well my mother (yes, I had a mother as well!) always hid something to take away the sting of their state-sponsored theft. But when commissars came to lecture us about the growing storm, which would become "The Great Patriotic War", my mother did not think to hide her child.

They had smart uniforms, and a wondrous machine called a motorcycle, and being a boy I was very impressed, running up to them as they addressed the collective. It was 1941, and the Germans had just invaded us. At this moment they were raging eastwards, a murdering mob, coming to burn our babies.

My joy became horror. I was 16 years old, large and muscular for my age, so I was amongst the first that they grabbed. They put a gun in my hand, a WW I relic, likely to explode, although they gave me no bullets for it. Words pumping from a well-oiled throat, we are ordered into formation.

"March!" the commissar barks, pointing across the fields to the West, beyond which the monsters known as "The Huns" were gathered.

We were not given the option of saying "no" as a small truck full of soldier’s rolls up. I was not able to say goodbye to my parents, but my dog, Nevsky, catches up to me, bounding and frantic. He paws at me, imploring me with his eyes and mouth. I feel the grief of my parents as the dog jerks about, trying to reach me in the most basic of terms, annoyed at my human stupidity, not understanding the guns. Bundled figures clutching obsolete weapons stumble past, warning me of "the commissar". But my dog and myself have become a steaming tableau, and I follow his beckoning head to the far-off figures of my parents, who had realized the end had come but were still trying to deliver unto me a bag containing food and warm clothing.

I dreamt of love. Love, and the sudden loss of it. My brain was warm, my face flushed. I think I began to cry. A memory of tears I never had, wept for a family that never was. My father’s huge beard bobbing towards me, helping my mother across a puddle. His mission fulfilled, Nevsky gives in to ecstasy, barking messily and rolling in the grass. And now my father and my mother, their voices calling to me, their only child....

But I didn’t have a father or a mother. I didn’t even have a name, except for Whargoul. This dream didn’t even surprise me, because it was my fondest wish, to be human. Yes, that may surprise you, but I would trade my life for yours in an instant. My existence was a curse. With the perspective of hindsight, I saw that my life had become an atrocity.

I am grabbed roughly and do not resist. Smiling blankly, I ignore my parents. There is a gun sprouting from a black glove, and I am shoved forward. It feels good, but I don’t know why. Watching from the truck, smoking a cheroot, the commissar--well, he smiles too. After all, he had come here to get me.

My parents are led away, along with wailing others, but not before everything they carried was confiscated. The village was looted. There was a lie that the goods would be "adequately distributed" even as brutish hands violate my mother’s sack, pawing the treats into their greasy mouths. Nevsky follows still, barking from a distance as I walk away from everything I have ever known towards something no one ever should. I was lucky--most of the conscripted "soldiers" of my village had neither coats nor weapons, just an order given from the end of a gun.

We marched towards the arena, feeling as a Nubian would, brought to Rome to fight and die, brought to Harlem to shoot dope into his heart. Ahead the Coliseum looms like a beckoning tomb, the crowd within raging with wine and lust. The New York skyline swirls with hell-dust. A lion trots about with a human spine in mouth, glorious droplets of blood staining the thirsty ground.

That day they stole all the young men. They beat my father and took his coat. They shot my dog and raped my Mom.

Know what? I didn’t feel a fucking thing.

My eyes open as I snap from a drug-induced coma to the lair of the living dead. The familiar angles of my space, the flickering TV, my gun rack, and another slobbering dog...licking my face. Another drug-drenched reverie was over, and I was back in Harlem.

How had I been made? Had I actually been human once? I knew the answers were in my mind, but how could I distinguish between fanciful dreams and actual memories? The fact was that I could not. But wasn’t that as good as truth? After all what really mattered except what I thought?

This story seemed as good as any. I’d been born a human, a strong and healthy one. Then something had happened that had turned me into Whargoul. I had been unleashed upon the world to rape and slay. My mission was both to create and destroy life.

The mere fact that I existed seemed to contradict rather radically a number of popular mindsets, most notably the idea of a benevolent God, which ruled the kingdom of heaven, and earth, was all-powerful (created everything), and only suffered hell to exist as a punishment camp for sinners. This seemed rather quaint after visiting Auschwitz. I could believe perhaps that this god was an evil one.

Hell’s domain existed on the surface of the Earth as well as in its bowel’s--and it’s estates were spreading. If this white-bearded, male, cracker-assed God was supposed to protect the humans, and he does claim you as children, then dock that God a days pay for napping on the job. The innocent (weak) were usually the first ones lined up against the wall, and their murder supplied the evil ones with the energy to thrive. This is how I lived. Thriving on the harvesting of souls. The killing continued, unabated, all sides thinking they were just. Men did much of the killing, men who were devils, who followed devils that were not men. I was a devil. Where was the "all-mighty" while all of this was going on?

Man created God out of wishful thinking, granting him the powers that men could never wield, and transcribing his laws into words for the humans to govern their lives by. These "Ten Commandments" are supposedly the WORDS OF GOD, but even they are open to interpretation.

For instance, lets look at "Thou shalt not kill". Sounds pretty straight-up, huh? Don’t kill each other! But no son, God didn’t really mean that. He meant not to kill the good people, the ones on our side. That’s why you joined the military, to know who’s who. But what about when good people got killed? Well, that was God’s will, son, and we can’t question his cosmic designs. There is a greater good he does, even as he allows children to be thrown into pits full of starving rats. Now get in your plane and drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

I’d come to believe that their God was a lie, often used to seduce and suck choirboy cock, or lead millions to their deaths. You’d be better off without him clouding your senses.

And your Jesus was highly overrated. After all, I’d come back from the grave half a dozen times, forming whole bodies from the juice of dead ones, growing new skin, tissue, hair...and I’d played the martyr, with the best intentions a martyr can possibly have. I had thrown myself on grenades to save others, taken bullets that violated me in the most hideous of ways, stayed behind to cover my men’s retreat as shells tore my guts apart--who was to say that his sacrifice was greater than mine?

Mine, the poor Whargoul who has cried to your heaven for mercy countless times, and had never received anything but pain. You are not good and you are not all-powerful, for you simply do not exist. And I’ve come to the painful conclusion that you cannot help me.

God was a misdirection play from the other side.

But I was alive. And I enjoyed playing the martyr. I was recyclable. I had already outlived Jesus by at least 20 years, but had died five times. Maybe there was something of the savior in me. The only thing I truly believed in was that anything was possible. Why couldn’t I transform myself into a redeemer, why couldn’t I save the world? But there were reasons, reasons that had to be destroyed. And the biggest one was that I had been designed to do exactly the opposite.

They make me do bad things. They make it feel so good that I want to do them. So I shoot-up and sprawl around, ignoring the call. But I have to eat, and they make it hurt so badly when I don’t.

I lie on my couch for days. The drugs are wearing off and I have none left to prolong my narcoleptic stupor. In about a day the inside of my bones will start to itch. I’ll try to ignore the signs, fight back with beer or food indulgence, but sooner or later I will have to kill a human.

My gut will start to grumble, my head will begin burning, and obsessive thoughts of bloodlust will return with increasing frequency. A craving, a necessity, that I am ultimately powerless to control. Over the space of a few days the pains would grow from annoyance to agony. Ropy veins would bunch about my temples and heave with fluid, causing excruciating headaches that threaten to blind me. My muscles would start throbbing with their own life, sending me in circles, walking from place to place in my house, dizzy and twitching, forgetting what I’m doing and losing things I’ll need. The sweet spew of the cortex kiss is all that can relieve my torment, but still I resist.

Now, even huge doses of alcohol and sedatives are powerless against the surging tide of hatred that encompasses me. Then the visions begin, the nightmares, the horror of myself. First come whirling patterns of rotting flesh, which drape my inner eye. I can’t turn it off. The dead rise from within me, muttering their accusations, as they approach my paralyzed form, across which spiny maggots writhe.

I am re-wounded, and sometimes I replay episodes where I have been tortured. I relive the pain, all the pain, made even worse by my pre-knowledge of it. I bite the carpet so my howls won’t be heard for blocks. And then my victims are upon me. I become them for their final seconds, feel them being throttled, or stomped, feel knives being rammed into their guts, feel improvised weapons, like cinder blocks, smashing their skulls, and then finally the guns, bombs, and shells which have been my greatest tool of harvest. I feel what it’s liked to be raped to death. I feel what it is like to be destroyed by the Whargoul, and it is the cruelest of fates.

The worst part about it is that I do not recognize the vast majority of the people I have slain. So far, I had not repeated any of these episodes, so I really had no idea as to the scope of my crimes. Suffice to say that they were vast beyond comprehension, brought me unimaginable suffering, and could only be temporarily relieved by committing even more hideous acts.

So I roll around on the floor screaming, bellowing at the walls and smashing up my apartment. That is the extreme state of the deprivation, and I don’t often go that far. I usually cave-in as soon as I run out of drugs, before I reach the final and most unbearable stage, the pure and raw physical torture of starvation, unfulfilled bloodlust, and heroin withdrawal. Usually I kill before it gets that bad, but sometimes I wait too long, and that’s when I make mistakes, like the one I made the other day, another mistake....

The man in the expensive suit had come into the neighborhood to stump for votes. Any attention from the city was rare but what really surprised me was that he was white, with a mixed-color entourage of supporters, including a couple of security goons. The guy was running for city council, and his name was Moyer. All this I discern through binoculars from my upper observation post, as I examine the parked orange van, the politician and his cronies, and the small crowd of people that is beginning to clot around him.

A banner goes up--MOYER NOW! it proclaims. Moyer removes his jacket and rolls his sleeves up around his beefy arms, facing the locals who eye him with suspicion. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but he gestures with vigor, sweeping his arms across the wretched landscape as if he could magically transform the rotting structures into tenable dwellings.

Normally I would have applauded the man’s courage--it took nuts to come into the projects, especially this one, and try to talk to people who generally despise you. But my thoughts were not my own, and my hunger burned like an atomic ulcer. Who was this white motherfucker to come in here and pretend he gave a damn about these people, just so he could get on the evening news? You have damned us, and your pathetic attempts to right these wrongs are as transparent as your skin is pale. His admirable qualities become highlights on the menu, and I decide to kill him and as many of his lackeys as possible.

Pulling on my black ski mask, I am instantly flushed with relief, as if I am being rewarded with a blessing from hell to affirm in myself the correctness of my decision. I pause to grab a couple of items I’ll need, and then leap to the elevator door, moving through it into the open shaft. My pathetic attempts at morality have vanished, my burgeoning humanity again postponed by my irresistible lust, though I don’t yet realize it. My mind is too full of the contemplation of my attack, the review of my positions and the anticipation of all possible variables. I fully realize the consequences of the situation. Racial tension was high and the mid-summer sun didn’t help much. This would really aggravate the situation. But for reasons at this point unknown, it doesn’t bother me. I have become my original self again, and the more violence that this spawned, the happier I would be.

I move into the underworld, knowing my passages were secure, as I didn’t allow the terrain to go too deep. I’d blocked holes, drained certain areas, and installed supplies. I even had a boat down there somewhere. Reasonably cocky near my Harlem H.Q., I had barely encroached upon the underworld of New York City, 2001. I suspected that it was far vaster than its surface-oriented counterpart, and just as populated.

Scurrying up a concrete tube, I elongate my body. My hunger pains disappear as I rush like water, and it feels so good to shift my strength to where it propels me the quickest, lightening and lifting, and plunging my now snake-like form through a web of difficult passages, finally entering a main artery half-filled with rancid sludge. Moving along the edge, I shake myself back into form and enter a pentagonal intersection of several tunnels. Rudely, I realize they probably put more effort into the construction of this place than any of the inhabited buildings above. Graffiti is evident as is trash and other signs of subterranean activity, highlighted by the slashing sunlight, which shafts into the pillbox from two street-level gutters. To one of these I go, sighting Moyer and his liar’s party engaged in a lively debate with a now 50-strong group of locals. I hear the word " bullshit" repeatedly as I remove the first of the two items I have brought, setting it up facing the street in some weeds, just inside the aperture. Now I hear shouts concerning "Baby Kiesha" and "rats"- angry shouts. I connect the wires and arm the device as the shouts grow to that of a belligerent mob.

"Now I know you’re upset," blares a bullhorn in the hands of the candidate, slowly backpedaling in front of the pressing throng. There is an unexpected shriek of feedback from his loudhailer and he stares at it confusedly for a split-second, a split-second that several men in the crowd use to good advantage by stepping aggressively forward. He raises his horn just in time for it to catch the sound of him being struck in the head with a sweeping fist-to-elbow blow. Horn meets head and both break, sending Moyer reeling onto the van. Blood rushes to his face as his attacker melds back into the mass, which instantly erupts into cheers.

I also hear a helicopter.

The mob surges forward, held back only by the two goons who become the new victims. Ironically, they are both black. A smartly-dressed female helps the bleeding politician into his van. Laughing hysterically I remove the manhole cover above me, and then scramble out of the sewer, trailing wire. I stand behind a pole and observe the vehicle, now fully loaded. People pound loudly on its side as it begins to pull away. A bottle strikes it, glittering shards expanding like the voluminous throb in my skull, and then a volley of rocks. Moyer is behind the wheel with blood streaming from the bridge of his nose, his face pale and terrified. Clearing the milling crowd, he guns it towards my position and the exit beyond, leaving the security guards behind. As he passes I detonate the Claymore anti- personnel mine at what I am certain is the perfect time.

The weapon blows, hurling 500 steel balls of buckshot in an expanding cone with a one-foot base. The van is only ten feet away and hopefully takes 100% of the balls. It’s as if a giant shotgun were discharged into the vehicle. The swirl of flame, the report and impact all occur simultaneously, as I leap behind the blast as close as I dare to behold the ruined thing, shuddering to a halt in a gush of smoke. There is a great hole where the driver’s door used to be, surrounded by a perforated expanse of smaller holes, each denoting potential death and covering a wide swath of the vehicle’s hide. The tires, the windows, and mirrors are all blown-out, and flames begin to sprout from beneath the hood. The tank will blow soon so I have to work fast, bulling through the hole and over the mangled corpse of Moyer--a bloody potato with protruding ribs, devoid of clothing from the waist up, headless. The van’s interior and all victims are pasted with most of his head and upper chest, and everywhere are jagged bits of bone and soggy brain, mingled with chunks of meat sprouting hairs or draped with smoking skin. The body of the woman next to him is jerking in her death-throes, charred face graced with 12 black holes, running red. I elbow her aside, jumping into the back where three of them are still alive. One is gagging from the fumes of the wreck, and I move to him with my second item, a polished metal tube a little bigger than a common drinking straw. Its sharpened end finds easy purchase in the flesh at the base of his skull. I grind it in, and then deliver a sharp blow to the other end of the tube. With a crunch it bites through the skull and lodges in the cerebral cortex. I suck.

"It’s in the brainstem," would read the cover of my brochure as to why I coveted the consumption of brain juice, and recommended it for all. Why? I didn’t know for sure, but I had arrived at certain conclusions: your brain is the most complicated and mysterious organ in your body, and it thrives on the finest of nutrients and proteins. Think of it as the engine of a sophisticated racing machine. This machine is made up of wheels and cables, fiberglass and wire--a variety of parts that would be totally inert unless driven by the engine--an engine that could not start unless it was primed with high-octane racing gasoline. Before the gas even reached the engine it was strained and filtered in a variety of ways so that only the most volatile mixture was ignited, ensuring top performance. The brain was much the same. All the shit you humans cram into your festering pie-holes is broken down into essential elements for the continuation of life. The finest of these elements go to the brain--high-octane gas for your mental engine. This substance collects in the brainstem and is drawn, as needed, into the vaulted spaces of your mind, and for whatever reasons (which I did not yet understand) I required it for the sustenance of my own existence.

So think of me as the punk kid who siphons the gas out of your brain.

As the van begins to consume itself, and the helicopter hovers like some voyeuristic insect, I slump, overwhelmed by the relief which courses through my being. The hunger dissipates, replaced by a glowing, giggling glee, which is augmented by the fact that I have more food close at hand, which I bend to with alacrity, jamming my feeding device into yet another skull and sucking out his ism as the gas tank explodes.

"Yowch!" The cab fills with flame as I take my leave, bursting out the back doors and into the street, rolling once to extinguish my clothing and coming to my feet right in full view of the stupefied crowd, the hovering TV news helicopter, and the previously unseen cop car rolling in my direction.

I hightail it for the sewer, flattening my form and pouring into it like a gush of slime. Then I’m gone, ignoring the shouts and the sirens, racing through my maze and at one point blocking the tunnel with a plug three men couldn’t move. I don’t stop until I’m back in my fort, up to the lookout post on top and gazing upon the carnage in the street four blocks away.

Normally the cops didn’t even come into my neighborhood unless there was a corpse to pick up, and that day they had several. The aftermath of my actions would be the first step on the way to the troubles I would experience over the next few months. You just can’t go around exploding Claymores and brain-sucking potential council-members, no matter how strongly you might disagree with their policies. My methods were usually much more covert and most of my victims were never found, plus I preferred hunting those that society would never miss anyway.

On orders from those that I had sworn to destroy, I had violated my own code. I had committed a flagrantly violent public action, murdering a prominent figure. It drew unwanted attention to my realm. For the next few days the police presence was heavy, as the cops imposed a curfew and ransacked local dwellings for evidence, inflaming the bad feelings on both sides. Several humans were hauled away and beaten half to death; one had a mop-handle rammed up his ass. The area around the crime was cordoned off for days and meticulously searched. They even sent dogs into the sewer and I think Maug (my dog) killed one, as he came back slick with blood, panting and happy. It was dumb luck that my domicile was not discovered, but I was ready to defend it if it had been. And that would have been a real mess. Had I known the real reason that I’d committed the crime, I scarcely would have believed it myself. As it was, I wouldn’t begin to realize the full implications until a week later when my growing hunger compelled me to venture once again out of my fort.

My first week in "Das Reich" was an eventful one.

My flesh had stopped regenerating for the nonce, even though I didn’t have any skin. I felt fairly certain that it would return with my next feeding, which could wait, if need be, for some time. This was due to my experiences in the hospital, sucking the soul-wafts of the mangled. My batteries were fully charged. It was a good thing because I had been under intense pressure and scrutiny since my enrollment in the division.

A black truck filled with soldiers takes me to a small and isolated camp, deep in the Romanian wilderness. I am under strict guard--ten soldiers with heavy weapons that follow me everywhere. They do not speak, and they have faces that look like turnips.

In a cool concrete chamber, I am interrogated about the Russians, their tactics, and weapons. The voices come through the wall. I tell them everything I can, and I knew a lot. The questions about my personal history never came. Where I’d been born, what my name was, what my family was doing--these were questions at that point unpondered by me, and already known to them. I was assigned a name: "Joseph Mueller", which was just about as generic as you could imagine. Then they teach me about the German army, just the facts and the manner in which I must behave in order to "fit in." There are also visual aids. It takes a couple days.

Then it’s off to the range. I am taught war skills. Usually I train alone, though I am always under guard. I am instructed and supervised by Sturmscharfuhrer Trengret, a member of the "Werewolf" order. We are followed by an large armored car, an SdKfz 232 with eight wheels and numerous MG’s, along with a 37 mm cannon in the turret. Trengret reports to the vehicle for orders. He talks to it, and it talks back. The German small arms I am already familiar with, so they teach me how to drive a tank, how to shoot a rocket launcher, and many other techniques of murder that will prove useful. I ask to fly planes but they will not let me. So I shoot guns and blow stuff up all day. Nice work, when I can get it.

I rest in one room, the guards in the other. I am instructed not to speak with them. They don’t talk to each other either, and eat brown paste that comes out a hole in the wall. I am brought food, which I don’t need but still enjoy. After a week I’m getting pretty hungry, and the guards are starting to look good. But I act with the iron will that is expected of me.

One day I realized that training was over. Alone in a field, I watch the soldiers pile in the truck and drive off towards camp without me. The SdKfz sits for a moment, regarding me, then also moves off in a different direction at high speed. Grabbing my weapons, I run towards camp, taking a short leap off a cliff and arriving before the truck. I take up a position outside the camp and wait. The SdKfz comes into view first, atop a small hill overlooking the whole scene. Then comes the truck, barreling down the road. I fire my Panzershrek (shoulder-mounted rocket launcher) in a flurry of angry sparks. The truck erupts in flame and slews to a halt, a chorus of high, piping screams escaping. Blazing men stumble out, their ammo exploding. I cut them down with my sub-machine gun and advance, looking for a feed. I barely see the grenade explode and take a heavy blow. Dropped to the earth, I scuttle away, leaving the dead and my filthy prize. There is metal in my face and chest, but I’m not badly hurt.

Trengret bursts into view through a wall of smoke, upon me with a dagger. I twist about and take the blade in the shoulder, hardening the flesh and snapping the blade as my hands grasp his throat and then his skull, forcing him down while driving my claws into his flesh. I break open his neck at the base of the skull and force my tongue into the hole, not missing a drop.

Finishing my meal, I hear the familiar rattling of tank treads. It is the PZ IV I had been training on, rushing down the road to the scene of carnage and loosing a shell at me. I duck under the explosion and run off in a great looping circle. The tank turns with me, rotating its turret and firing madly, bullets striking just behind me as I outrun its axis of fire and get behind it. The driver throws the transmission into reverse and tries to run me over, but I bound onto the rear of the tank, ripping open the engine cover and dropping a grenade inside, just as the rotating main gun knocks me off. The grenade explodes, doing unknown damage. The tank continues to grind about, searching for me as a sudden gush of black smoke rushes from the rear deck. I leap onto the front deck and ram my SMG into the vision slit, spraying a stream of lead into the aperture from point blank range. Metal explodes into the drivers face, and I jam the muzzle of my weapon further into the small opening, pumping a full clip of fire into the tank’s interior, filling it with shredding lead which is dense enough to--FLAM!--set off a shell just as my gun explodes--I pitch into space boots first as the shattered weapon melds with my arm and face in a glorious ripping of flesh and steel, arranged in a cone of fire. The beast immolates itself as I thud into the earth.

Rising painfully, I regard the burning tank. They are all aflame, so there is no food. Brain juice burned up quick.

"What a waste," I sniffle.

Suddenly I hear a voice, from a distance, calling to me. A metallic voice, rising from a speaker attached to the front of an armored car.

"Mueller! It is I, the Obersturmbannfuhrer!"

I look towards the hollow sound.

"You have made me proud. I can see I was right about you. It is good that you are back with us."

I stand there, covered in blood, uniform aflame, a dopey look on my writhing face.

"There will be no more mistakes. There is a new offensive. This time you shall fight on the correct side. If you return, I shall tell you more. Walk down the road. A vehicle will meet you. Inside will be normal soldiers. Do not kill them. They will furnish you with papers and you shall assume the identity described within. There will no longer be a guard upon you. You shall be conveyed to a front-line unit, which you shall join as a replacement soldier of the "Das Reich" division. Your new life begins today."

I stare back, deeply satisfied. I had waded through rivers of gore for this moment, and I knew that I deserved it. Finally I was